News of interest from Latin America by David Morris
Vol. 1, No. 9. Monday, October 29, 2007

Dominican Republic: no choice

A month after feminists throughout Latin America rallied for reproductive freedom, the Catholic Church is continuing an all-out effort to preserve the Dominican abortion law, one of the most repressive in the hemisphere. The Day for the Decriminalization of Abortion in Latin America and the Caribbean on September 28 originated with a resolution passed at the fifth Latin American and Caribbean Feminist Forum held in San Bernardo, Argentina, in 1990. It was supported in the Dominican Republic by the Coalición por un Código Penal Moderno y Consensuado (CCPMC), a group formed to lobby a legislative committee currently studying revision of the country’s penal code. Dominican law, like those of Chile, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, prohibits abortion altogether. Conviction for performing the operation carries a sentence of five to 20 years in prison. The CCPMC argues for making abortion legal if the mother’s health is in danger, if the pregnancy results from rape or incest, or if the fetus is severely deformed or abnormal.

In opposition to the CCPMC and with the full cooperation of government officials, the church in the Dominican Republic, as in other Latin American countries, has organized a number of demonstrations, bussing students from its schools to rally at the national capital, where they, unlike other demonstrators, have been welcomed into the legislative chambers. Father Luís Rosario, coordinator of the church campaign, told the students assembled at one demonstration that if the legislature decriminalizes abortion it may as well also decriminalize homicide.

The president of the Dominican senate, Reinaldo Pared Pérez, and his wife visited the Vatican in late October, where they were granted an audience with the Pope, who transmitted a radio message of encouragement back to Dominican anti-choice forces. Cardinal Nicolás de Jesús López Rodríguez, archbishop of Santo Domingo, suggested in a recent national radio and television broadcast that certain unnamed groups were plotting to make fortunes from the decriminalization of abortion, presumably by operating clinics.

One Mexican priest, Father Julián Cruzalta, of the Red de Investigadores y Académicos de Derechos Humanos de México, participates in CCPMC.

Abortion is available on demand during the first trimester of pregnancy in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guyana and, since April 24 of this year, in the Distrito Federal of Mexico, but in the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean it is either prohibited altogether or is severely restricted.

By recent estimates, around four million abortions are performed each year in Latin America, almost all of them clandestine and unsafe, and more than 70,000 Latin American women die from them every year. In Latin America as a whole, there are some 33.9 abortions a year for every 1,000 women, while there are about 43.7 per thousand Dominican women. Of an estimated 82,500 abortions performed in the Dominican Republic in one recent year, 16,500 resulted in hospitalizations to repair the damage done.

In El Salvador, the law was changed in 1998 to make abortion illegal under any circumstances. The law carries sentences of up to eight years in prison for the pregnant woman and up to 12 years for anyone else performing an abortion. In the first year and a half under the new law, criminal charges were brought against 69 people. El Salvador’s maternal death rate of 300 per 100,000 births is one of the highest in the region.

In Nicaragua, abortion to save the mother’s life was legal until last fall’s presidential election campaign when most of the candidates, including the winner, Sandinista and former president Daniel Ortega, supported changes urged by the Catholic Church to outlaw it altogether. As a result, 87 Nicaraguan women have died in the past year for lack of therapeutic abortions. Edmundo Jarquín of the dissident Sandinistas was the only candidate opposing the change.

Therapeutic abortion was legal in Chile until 1989, when the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet made it a crime punishable by up to five years in prison. With physician and feminist Michelle Bachelet of the Socialist Party now in the presidency, the government has made sex education and contraception more widely available, including birth-control and morning-after pills for women as young as 14, with no parental consent required, but has not tackled the abortion law. The center-left Socialist Party is in a coalition with the socially more conservative Christian Democrats, who oppose any change in the law.

(Sources: Diario Libre, Dominican Republic; The Guardian, UK; Guttmacher Institute, US; Human Rights Watch, US; Listín Diario, Dominican Republic; New York Times, US; Nuevo Diario, Nicaragua; El Universal, Mexico; ZNet, US)


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